Three Books Every Firearms Trainer SHOULD read…

Why? Because they’re too busy trying to be a good gunslinger, not a good businessman.

A quick story.

The email at the right here is a perfect example of why I still try to help out the gun industry with marketing. This is an email from Bass Pro Shops, one of the biggest names in firearms retail, and it sucks. Someone in their marketing department decided that making everything look pretty was more important than getting the message across, so they designed what I assume is a pretty-looking .jpg image that had all their content on it, dropped that image into a basic .html message, and voila, out it goes, and the money comes POURING in.

Except, of course, that images in an email are turned of by default in most email clients these days. This means people will have to REALLY want to read your message and turn images on for you before they have a clue what you’re trying to say. Also (and even worse), emails that are nothing but an image get clobbered by spam filters, which means chances are that email never got to their inbox in the first place, and if it did, because it was nothing but an image, it’s going to hurt the deliverability of your emails for months to come.

So what three books should a firearms trainer read to help avoid a rookie mistake like this?